The following is what you ought to have seen. Aravinda sent me a mail
asking what is "chao-ware".
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I am familiar with Suresh's program, so let me comment on it, in
his absence. He will be back in less than a month and can correct
any misinterpretations.
The program (written in C) identifies laghu/guru mAtra syllables,
and takes into account the compound-consonant conditions. Initially
it did not correctly identify the situations given as examples by
Syamala Rao. I don't remember the example, but let me give the line
lAvokkintayu lEdu, dhairyamu vilOmbayye, prANambulun ...
Here, the last syllable in "vilOlambayye" is a laghuvu, even though
the first syllable in the next word is a compound consonant "prA".
This is because in between the two words, there is a naturally occurring
pause, that breaks the connection between the two syllables in question.
To take care of this situation, a special character had to be placed at
such positions, for the software to properly parse the mAtras. Things
like "/", "\" were proposed, but I suggested a double space between
such words which serves the same purpose, but would be transparent
to the casual reader. He has incorporated this, and it works to
a large extent. Of course one can visualize situations where it can
be tripped. In the famous poem,
akroora varada kESava
cakrAyudha pANi! ....
the first syllable "a" is a guruvu, because the "kroo" next to it. But
when you use the eigth vowel, long-R, sometimes the preceding laghuvu
stays a laghuvu. The common example given for this is the word "pitRNamu"
(the R should be long, but I forgot the RIT notation for it). There are
times poets exercise their license as per the demands of chandassu.
Having then identified the laghuvu-guruvu sequence of syllables in a line,
it is a simple matter to identify whether the poem is one of the
Gang-of-Four (GOF) vRttas (campaka mAla, utpala mAla, mattEbhamu, SArdUlamu)
But any of the other popular meters pose tremendous challenges. Kandam
with its dozen or so rules, seesam, ATaveladi, tETagIti, madhyAkkara -
these have a wide latitude in the allowed gaNas. The program needs to
be quite "intelligent" to identify these.
There can be traps too! Some lines of a seesa padyam can be mistaken
for lines from a tETagIti, or ATaveladi. I'll try to come up
with examples later. Of course, these are peculiar circumstances, and
one program need not take care of all eventualities.
This comp/keyboard/modem connection is introducing a lot of glitches.
I'll stop here and resume later.
Ramakrishna